C. Sedgwick in the Nation, for example, thought Crane “a rather promising writer of the animalistic school,”10 a form of praising with faint damns. In all, The Red Badge of Courage made him famous and, but for his profligate spending, it might have made him rich.

Instead, he continued to work at a furious pace. In November 1896, Crane accepted an assignment from the Bacheller syndicate to report on the political situation in Cuba. While waiting to sail from Jacksonville he met Cora Taylor, madam of a fashionable brothel, who soon becomes his common-law wife. On New Year’s Eve he sailed for Cuba on the filibustering steamer Commodore, which foundered off the coast of Florida on 2 January 1897 after the boiler exploded. With three other men he drifted in a small dinghy for thirty hours before they reached shore near Daytona Beach. The experience would inspire one of his most famous stories, “The Open Boat.” In March he accepted an assignment with the Hearst papers and the McClure syndicate to cover the month-long Greco-Turkish war in the spring. Accompanied by Cora, Crane spent the next several weeks on the continent before settling in England. There he met Joseph Conrad and wrote “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky” and “The Blue Hotel,” both based on his trip to the West in early 1895. Accepting an assignment from the New York World to cover the Spanish-American War in Cuba, he landed with the U.S. Marines at Guantánamo in June 1898 and lived in Havana from August until December, filing occasional dispatches. In December he returned to England deep in debt and spent the entire next year vainly trying to earn enough money by writing to appease his creditors. Crane suffered a tubercular hemorrhage in December 1899 and his health rapidly failed. He died six months later in a Black Forest village in southern Germany. In The Green Hills of Africa (1935) Ernest Hemingway expressed his admiration for Crane’s writing and when asked “what happened to him?” he replied, “He died. That’s simple. He was dying from the start.”11

 

One of the most rapidly maturing authors in American literary history, Crane refined the crude brand of naturalism evident in his first novel Maggie in his masterwork The Red Badge of Courage. He broadly modeled the battle in the novel on the battle of Chancellorsville in early May 1863, with Fleming’s regiment, the 304 th New York, based on the 124th New York, a unit raised around Port Jervis. Still, the novel invokes the names of no officers associated with the fight because, as Crane explained later, “it was essential that I should make my battle a type” so as not to raise the ire of any generals in the field.12 Instead, Crane’s characters were archetypes—e.g., “the tall soldier,” “the youth,” “the loud soldier,” “the cheery soldier,” “the tattered soldier”—for the same reason the four characters in “The Open Boat” are identified simply as the cook, the captain, the oiler, and the correspondent. Much as Crane’s soldiers in Red Badge are given names (e.g., Jim Conklin, Henry Fleming, Wilson) only in dialogue, the single character given a name in “The Open Boat” (Billie) is so distinguished in dialogue as well.

The novel is often regarded as an initiation story in the grand American tradition of Hawthorne’s “My Kinsman, Major Molineaux,” Melville’s Redburn, and Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. The director John Huston endorsed this interpretation when he cast Audie Murphy, the most decorated American combat soldier in World War II, as the hero of the film version released in 1951. But, in truth, Crane’s novel confounds the critics who try to read it as a Bildungsroman. Henry Fleming never really grows or learns anything. Or as Charles C. Walcutt insists, “Increasingly, Crane makes us see Henry Fleming as an emotional puppet controlled by whatever sight he sees at the moment. . . . If there is any one point that has been made it is that Henry has never been able to evaluate his conduct.